Amazing write up, so glad you are in this world and have done all you've done.
Admittedly I'm not a casual MBSR practitioner and I'm very interested in the deeper insights offered by authentic dharma practice, but I tend to feel skeptical of the "Buddhist teacher" tendency to dismiss McMindfulness so easily.
In my experience and understanding, concentration and insight are hard to really separate, especially especially at the early levels of practice. It's hard for me to imagine an untrained person learning casual mindfulness or even deep concentration practice without having many transformative, important, helpful insights along the way, even if they're as superficial as "It's actually possible for me to sit down without something to do for five minutes," and certainly deeper insights than that are very possible even without a super integrated pedagogical framework targeting insight.
But I'm not a teacher, and I haven't engaged all that much in McMindfulness spaces, so I don't really know.
Thanks Austin. FWIW, I distinguish between "McMindfulness" (think: 'find your zen' and influencers etc) and MBSR, which has helped so many people and offers depth. I agree that there are a ton of psychological-type insights that arise in simple concentration, and certainly I had a ton of them on my jhana retreats. Just dealing with the striving that inevitably arises when there's a goal (let alone a goal described as being awesome) is a whole retreat in itself. So I should maybe have been more precise that it's the core Vipassana insights that arise more with mindfulness than concentration - impermanence, suffering, non-self-ness; clinging and non-clinging; etc. These phenomena can be seen directly with mindfulness, but if you're noticing them while doing one-pointed concentration, you're not concentrating enough.
Whoa. I am a meditator, mindfulness coach and a big fan of yours. This article gives me a lot more to think about. Why are people drawn to try mindfulness? What can it do for them? What is it unlikely to do? Agree that the ethical part, which seems to be a goal in Buddhist traditions I’m familiar with, is a bedrock of becoming a good person.
Amazing write up, so glad you are in this world and have done all you've done.
Admittedly I'm not a casual MBSR practitioner and I'm very interested in the deeper insights offered by authentic dharma practice, but I tend to feel skeptical of the "Buddhist teacher" tendency to dismiss McMindfulness so easily.
In my experience and understanding, concentration and insight are hard to really separate, especially especially at the early levels of practice. It's hard for me to imagine an untrained person learning casual mindfulness or even deep concentration practice without having many transformative, important, helpful insights along the way, even if they're as superficial as "It's actually possible for me to sit down without something to do for five minutes," and certainly deeper insights than that are very possible even without a super integrated pedagogical framework targeting insight.
But I'm not a teacher, and I haven't engaged all that much in McMindfulness spaces, so I don't really know.
Thanks Austin. FWIW, I distinguish between "McMindfulness" (think: 'find your zen' and influencers etc) and MBSR, which has helped so many people and offers depth. I agree that there are a ton of psychological-type insights that arise in simple concentration, and certainly I had a ton of them on my jhana retreats. Just dealing with the striving that inevitably arises when there's a goal (let alone a goal described as being awesome) is a whole retreat in itself. So I should maybe have been more precise that it's the core Vipassana insights that arise more with mindfulness than concentration - impermanence, suffering, non-self-ness; clinging and non-clinging; etc. These phenomena can be seen directly with mindfulness, but if you're noticing them while doing one-pointed concentration, you're not concentrating enough.
Whoa. I am a meditator, mindfulness coach and a big fan of yours. This article gives me a lot more to think about. Why are people drawn to try mindfulness? What can it do for them? What is it unlikely to do? Agree that the ethical part, which seems to be a goal in Buddhist traditions I’m familiar with, is a bedrock of becoming a good person.